The 39th edition of Pordenone's "Silent Film Festival" (thanks to COVID-19) will be available online to Australian audiences from the 3 to the 10 October. On show will be recently restored masterpieces on view for the first time to today's audiences.
"There are no such thing as silent movies or sound movies. There are just movies", says the Festival's director Jay Weissberg.
Eleven masterpieces will be on show to world audiences, some of which are of considerable historical significance such as Moonlight and Noses by Stan Laurel, part of which was found in the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra and another part in the Library of Congress in Washington.
"For almost 80 years this film was believed to have been lost, or at least it was only available in fragments. Thanks to this discovery, it will finally be possible to see the complete film for the first time in almost 90 years", explains Weissberg.
"This project was made possible by the close collaboration that exists between Canberra and Washington."
The Silent Film Festival is available online from October 3 through 10 and features movies from China, the United States, Germany, Greece, Holland, France, Denmark and other countries.
For more information on the Festival and passes, click here.
Italian-Australian pianist Mauro Colombis is one of the many international musicians invited to compose music for the silent movies shown at the Festival.
Colombis composed the music for the 1928 German Film Abwege (The Devious Path) in G.W. Pabst’s cynical take about a woman (Brigitte Helm) who embraces hedonism when her husband neglects her.
Jay Weissberg was born in New York but moved to Rome as "I fell in love with the city" he admits.
He is a film critic for Variety since 2003 and a co-curator of Views from the Ottoman Empire, an archival project whose goal is to locate films shot in Ottoman territories and screen them in the locations where they originated.
